There was great appreciation for the Obama campaign and the way he used social media to drive awareness and affinity with his audience. His fan page today on Facebook has over 6 and a half million followers. Having seen this success story, Pope Benedict has also decided to use the social media platform to connect with the Catholic youth around the world.
The Pope launched the Youtube channel last year and now he is getting on to Facebook, with the launch of his own application “Pope2You”. The idea is to go beyond just a facebook application as there is a website too called pope2you.net which is trying to connect the Youtube channel, facebook app & the iPhone app. I’m sure it won’t be long before we see the Pope on Twitter.
The Vatican describes this as follows:
“Pope2You for Facebook lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. So you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”. The postcards can be sent to your “friends” on Facebook and the application can be shared with anyone.”
Pope Benedict's Page On Facebook
While it might be in the best interest of the Vatican to use Internet as a broadcast medium alone, I am not sure if this is going to be a great success. A large part of any success on the interactive medium lies on interactivity the medium provides. To genuinely build that connect people need to communicate, express their opinions & be heard.
Anyway, it would be interesting to see how this goes, but again a short interesting story on the impact of social media on the world of communications.
